THE MODEL
The morning broke clear and still across the scented bush, and Miss
Kinnaird and Ida Stirling, who had been awakened early by the
wonderful freshness in the mountain air, strolled some distance out of
camp. For a time they wandered through shadowy aisles between the
tremendous trunks, breathing in sweet resinous odors, and then, soon
after the first sunrays came slanting across a mountain shoulder, they
came out upon a head of rock above the river. A hemlock had fallen
athwart it, and they sat down where they could look out upon a
majestic panorama of towering rock and snow.
Arabella Kinnaird gazed at it intently when she had shaken some of the
dew from the frills and folds of her rather bedraggled skirt.
"It will never be quite the same again," she observed, evidently in
reference to the latter, and then waved one hand as though to indicate
the panorama, for she was usually voluble and disconnected in her
conversation. "This, as I said last night, is wonderful--in fact, it
almost oppresses one. It makes one feel so little, and I'm not sure
that I like that, though no doubt it does one good."
Her companion smiled.
"Aren't you going to paint it?" she asked.
Miss Kinnaird pursed up her face, which was a trick she had.
"Oh," she said, "I don't know. After all, portraiture is my specialty,
and this silent grandeur is a little beyond my interpretation."
She paused, and added the next few words in an authoritative manner,
as though she had a truth of some consequence to deliver:
"The difficulty is that you really can't interpret anything until you
are quite sure what it means. You see, I'm feverishly restless by
temperament, and accustomed to indulge in all kinds of petty,
purposeless activities. They are petty, though the major calls them
duties--social duties--and being, I'm afraid, a rather frivolous
person in spite of my love of art, they appeal to me."
Ida said nothing. It was not necessary, and as a rule not advisable,
to encourage Arabella Kinnaird when she commenced, as she sometimes
described it, to talk seriously; and she rattled on:
"My dear, I'm all appreciation, and graciously pleased with the
wonders that you are showing me; but still this valley strikes me as
being short of something. It's too calm and quiet. Even Eden was not
complete until man appeared in it, though, as usual, he made trouble
shortly afterward. It is a thing he has kept on doing ever since."
Ida laughed.
"I'm not sure you're sticking to historical facts," she said.
"Facts," returned her companion, "don't count for much with me. I deal
in impressions; and sometimes I feel full of them. I could astonish
everybody if I could get them out; but that, of course, is the
difficulty. Feeling, unfortunately, isn't quite the same thing as
power of expression. Still, you asked me what I thought about these
mountains, and I'm trying to tell you. You have brought it on
yourself, you see. The key-tone of this place is an almost
overwhelming tranquillity. One rather shrinks from that kind of thing
when one is not used to it, and longs to do something to disturb it.
It's a natural impulse. When you see a smooth sheet of ice you
generally look for a big stone with which to smash it."
She swung around and favored her companion with a glance of critical
scrutiny; and there was no reason why Ida Stirling should shrink from
it. She sat leaning forward, looking out at the mountains with steady
eyes that had a half-smile in them. Her attitude was reposeful and her
face quiet; but there was something in both that faintly suggested a
decided character.
"I don't think I'm readily disturbed," she said.
"No," answered her companion reflectively, "but the disturbance will
no doubt come. You're in harmony with the key-tone of this valley; but
too much serenity isn't good for me; and it's probable that nobody
ever retains it very long. There's always the disturbing element in a
world that's full of men. It was, as I remarked, man who brought
trouble into Paradise."
Miss Kinnaird was addicted to talking a good deal of nonsense, and she
frequently wearied her listeners; but there was a certain shrewdness
in her, and at times she got near the truth. Indeed, her companion
afterward decided that she had done so in this case. Ida Stirling had
met many rising young men, and some who had made their mark, but none
of them had aroused in her the faintest thrill of unrest or passion.
So far, the depths of her nature had remained wholly unstirred. One
could almost have told it from her laugh as she answered her
companion's last observation.
"I thought it was woman's curiosity," she said; and then remembered
suddenly that on the previous evening she had certainly been a trifle
curious about the strange packer from the railroad gang.
Miss Kinnaird made no reply to this; but in a moment she stretched out
a pointing hand.
"Now," she said, "the disturbing element is obtruding itself."
Farther down the river there was a flash of something white amidst the
pale green shimmer of the flood. Ida rose, but her companion beckoned
her to sit down again.
"Oh," she said, a trifle impatiently, "don't be prudish. He's ever so
far off, and I've never had an opportunity to study anybody swimming."
It was, of course, Weston, who supposed himself far enough from camp
not to be troubled by spectators, swimming with a powerful side-stroke
upstream. Ida sat down again, and both of them watched him as he drew
a little nearer. So many times every minute his left arm swept out
into the sunlight as he flung it forward with far-stretched palm. It
fell with the faintest splash, and there was a little puff of spray as
his head dipped and the water washed across his lips. Then the white
limbs flashed amidst the green shining of the river, and the long,
lithe form contracted, gleaming as a salmon gleams when it breaks the
surface with the straining line. The still river rippled, and a
sun-bronzed face shot half-clear again. Miss Kinnaird watched the
swimmer's progress with open appreciation.
"Dancing," she said didactically, "isn't to be compared with that!
It's the essence of rhythmic movement! I must certainly study
swimming. I wish he'd come right on."
Ida was not sure that she agreed with her; and, just then, Weston,
swinging suddenly around, went down into the green depths, and,
shooting up with white shoulders high above the water, swept away
again down-stream. Miss Kinnaird rose as he did so, and turned back
toward the camp.
"That packer is rather fine, considered as a muscular animal," she
said.
Ida smiled at this, somewhat sardonically.
"In your country you wouldn't think of regarding him as anything else.
Doesn't being an artist emancipate one from the conventional point of
view?"
"No," replied Miss Kinnaird reflectively, "it doesn't, that is, when
you do not paint for your living--which, of course, alters
everything."
Then her eyes twinkled as she favored her companion with a passable
imitation of her father's didactic tone and manner.
"As the major says, social distinctions are necessary safeguards, and
cannot lightly be disregarded. If they were not, they could not have
existed as long as they have."
She laughed.
"In the case of a man who has inherited his station and his
possessions," she added, "it is a very natural and comfortable creed."
"Ah," said Ida, "my father worked in a sawmill."
She spoke quietly, but there was something in her voice that warned
her companion that there were subjects upon which they might have a
clash of opinion. In the east there is pride of possession; but the
pride of achievement, which is, perhaps, more logical, is more common
in the west.
It was an hour later when Weston laid breakfast before them; and Ida,
who regarded him unobtrusively with careful attention, decided that
Arabella Kinnaird was right. The packer, with his lean, symmetrical
litheness, his pleasant English face, his clear eyes, and his clean,
bronzed skin, was certainly well-favored physically, and she began to
wonder whether her companion could not have gone further in her
comments; until she remembered again that the commencement of a good
many troubles is probably woman's curiosity.
The canoes were launched after breakfast, and it was afternoon when
they pitched camp beside a still, blue lake. Then Major Kinnaird
strolled away with a trout-rod to a neighboring rapid, and Mrs.
Kinnaird went to sleep in a hammock. Her daughter got out her
sketch-book, and sitting down among the boulders bade Ida summon
Weston. He came, and stood looking at them inquiringly, picturesque in
his wide hat and his fringed deerskin jacket. Miss Kinnaird pursed up
her face.
"I want to make a sketch of you. You have rather a good head," she
said.
Weston gazed at her a moment in astonishment, and then a twinkle crept
into his eyes. Her matter-of-fact brusqueness, which made it perfectly
plain that his views in the matter did not count, might have roused a
sense of opposition in some men, but he had acquired a wide toleration
in western Canada.
"Shall I stand here, miss?" he asked.
"No," said the girl, "a little farther to the right, where the
sunlight falls upon the trunks behind you; but you mustn't look
wooden. That will do. Still, you'll have to take off that jacket. It's
frippery."
The suspicion of a flush crept into Weston's face; but, after all, a
loose blue shirt and duck trousers are considered dress enough in the
bush of the Pacific Slope, and he discarded the offending jacket. Miss
Kinnaird, however, was not quite satisfied.
"Can't you take up that ax and look as if you were ready to use it?"
she said. "Oh, no! That is far too much like a waxwork! Hold up your
head a little! Now, don't move any more than you can help! I think
that will do."
Weston stood as he was for the best part of an hour. He felt inclined
to wonder why he did it, as he had not found shoveling gravel anything
like so difficult. Then Miss Kinnaird informed him that, as she
desired to make a study of the background, she would not keep him any
longer; and he strolled away to the waterside, where, after stretching
himself wearily, he lay down and took out his pipe. He had not been
there long when Ida, who came out from among the trees, sat down on
one of the boulders not far from him.
"You must have been horribly cramped, but it didn't strike Miss
Kinnaird, or she wouldn't have kept you there so long," she said.
"No," answered Weston, reflectively, "I don't think it would strike
Miss Kinnaird. She's English, isn't she?"
"Of course. But aren't you English, too?"
Weston's eyes twinkled.
"I am. Still, I don't want you to think that it's merely because Miss
Kinnaird comes from the same country that I do that I didn't expect
her to realize that to stand posed for an hour or so is apt to cramp
one."
Ida laughed. It evidently was clear to him that Miss Kinnaird regarded
him as a packer and nothing else, and had decided that he had probably
grown used to physical discomfort. Ida was, however, rather pleased to
see that he accepted the fact good-humoredly and did not resent it.
She was in no way astonished that he should answer her as he had, for,
in the west, a man may speak naturally to any young woman who
addresses him, without feeling called on to remember the distinctions
of caste.
"I wonder," she said, "whether you would tell me what caused the
trouble you were mixed up in two or three nights ago."
Weston's face grew slightly flushed, for he was still in certain
respects somewhat ingenuous; but he told her simply what had led up to
the affray.
"After all you could hardly blame the boys," he added. "They had had a
hard day, and it was not the first time Grenfell had done them out of
their supper."
"Still, he had spoiled your supper, too," said Ida. "If you couldn't
blame them, why did you interfere?"
It was rather a difficult question. Weston could not very well tell
her, even had he quite realized it, that there was in him a vein of
rudimentary chivalry that had been carefully fostered by his mother.
The males of the Weston line had clung to traditions, but they had for
the most part been those of the Georgian days, when very little
refinement of sentiment was expected from the country gentleman. The
traditions Agnes Weston had held by, however, went back to an earlier
age. She had been High Church and imaginative, a woman of
impracticable as well as somewhat uncomfortable ideals, and finding
her husband proof against them she had done what she could with her
son. The result was a somewhat happy one, for in the Kid, as his
comrades termed him, her fantasies and extravagances had been toned
down by the very prosaic common sense of the Weston male line. They
were full-fleshed, hard-riding Englishmen who lived on beef and beer.
Though Weston was naturally not aware of it, there were respects in
which Ida Stirling was like his mother. Ida, however, usually kept her
deeper thoughts to herself, which Mrs. Weston had seldom done, but she
shaped her life by them, and they were wholesome.
"Well," he said diffidently, "it was quite a humiliating situation for
the old man. He was a person of some consequence once--a rather famous
assayer and mineralogist--and I think he felt it."
"That is not what I asked you," said Ida, with a trace of dryness.
Weston spread out his hands as though to excuse himself.
"Then," he said, "they were all against him, and I think Jake--I mean
the big chopper--would have forced the stuff down his throat. It was
horribly burnt. There are," and he hesitated, "things one really has
to do."
His companion nodded. She liked his diffidence, which, while very
evident, was wholly genuine, and the faint color in his face gave him
an appearance of boyish candor.
"Even when the odds against you are quite steep?" she said. "In the
case we are discussing the result was no doubt that bruise on your
face." Then she changed the subject. "If he was a famous mineralogist,
why is he cooking in a railroad camp?"
"Everybody knows," said Weston. "The usual trouble--whisky."
The girl made a little gesture of comprehension that had in it also a
hint of disgust, and then seeing that he would say nothing further
until she gave him a lead she spoke again.
"What brought you out here?" she inquired.
Weston had been asked the same question several times before, and had
never answered it. In fact, he did not know why he did so now.
"I quarreled with my people. In one respect, anyway, I don't regret
it. It's rather a beautiful country."
He sat, with his wide hat tilted back and the sun on his face, looking
out upon the blue lake between the towering pines. Their shadows
floated in it, and tremendous slopes of rock ran up toward the
gleaming snow on the farther side. The bush lay very silent under the
scorching sun, and it was filled with the heavy odors of the firs, in
which there was a clogging, honey-like sweetness.
"It's a little difficult to understand why you seem to be content with
track-grading. One would fancy it to be unusually hard work," said the
girl.
"Oh, yes," agreed Weston, laughing. "Still, you see, I don't intend to
remain a track-grader indefinitely."
"No?" said Ida, inquiringly. "What do you mean to do?"
Weston saw that she was interested, and he was still young enough to
be willing to discuss his own plans and projects--though for that
matter one comes across older men who can talk of nothing else.
"This country is full of gold and silver," he said. "Other men strike
it now and then, and I really don't see why I shouldn't."
"When they do, haven't they usually to sell it for almost nothing to
somebody who gets up a company? Besides, do you know anything about
prospecting?"
Weston laughed.
"A little. It's my one dissipation; and it's rather an expensive one.
You have to work for months to save enough to buy a camp outfit and
provisions, and if you mean to stay any time in the ranges you have to
hire a horse. Then you come back in rags with a bagful of specimens
that prove to be of no use at all; and you go to work again."
"You have done that often?"
"Three or four times."
"Then," asked Ida, "isn't it foolish to go back again?"
Weston looked at her a moment hesitatingly, and then made a little
gesture of deprecation.
"It sounds absurd, of course, but I have a fancy that if I keep it up
long enough I shall strike gold. You see I'm a water-finder, anyway."
"A water-finder?"
Weston nodded.
"It's an old English idea. Water evidently used to be scarcer there,
and even now there are places where good wells aren't plentiful. You
go along with a hazel twig, and it dips when you cross water running
underground. That is, if you have the gift in you. Anybody can't do
it. You think that quite foolish, don't you?"
Ida really did, though she did not seem to admit it.
"Have you ever tried the gift out here?" she asked.
"On the prairie, quite often. A good deal of it is burnt up and dry. I
generally found water."
"You turned the--power--to account? I mean--you made--money out of
it?"
There was a sudden change in Weston's face.
"No," he said, "I never took a cent."
"But why?"
"Well," replied the man slowly, "my mother had some old-world belief,
and she said it was a special gift. She knew I had it. She said a
thing of that kind should never be used for money."
"But haven't all those who claimed special powers--priests, magicians,
medicine-men--always been willing to sell them?"
Her companion's eyes twinkled.
"Well, I dare say they have. Still, you see, it's possible that they
never really had the gifts they claimed at all. Now I--can--find
water, and I have a notion that I can find the precious metals too.
Quite absurd, isn't it?"
Ida thought it was, but the quiet confidence behind his whimsical
manner appealed to her. He was, it seemed, a man of simple character
and few ideas, but she knew that he had nerve and vigor, and, after
all, the western Dominion is the land of strenuous, all-daring, simple
men. Besides, she had watched the resolution flash into his young face
when he stood facing the angry crowd of track-graders with the ax in
his hand, and she had seen very much the same tenacity and
steadfastness stamped on the faces of successful men. Her father was
one, and he was a man who had scarcely been educated, and was
certainly devoid of any complexity of character. Stirling had made his
mark by smashing down opposition, and, when that was not possible,
grimly holding on and bearing the blows dealt him. There was, as she
recognized, something to be said in favor of that kind of man.
Then Kinnaird came up through the bush with his rod and a few
troutlings, dry-shod and immaculate in a jacket that fitted him like a
uniform, and Ida went back to camp with him. She fancied, however,
that her father or Weston, who sat still and filled his pipe again,
would have come back with a heavy fish, or at least thorn-rent and
dripping wet.